Which is not what he said.He was defending himself against the accusation that the PS Vita is a flop and should be terminated. He's saying that people SHOULD have choices..... both free on the phone and professional-level games on portables like Nintendo DS and PSP/Vita.

I think the real problem here is trying to overcome Nintendo's dominance. Atari tried. Sega tried. Wonderswan tried. Sony tried (with PSP and then Vita). Nobody's been able to do it because Nintendo has a lock on portable game machines. Maybe because the primary audience for portables is kids (riding on buses, in cars, etc) and that is also Nintendo's primary audience.

He's saying that people SHOULD have choices..... both free on the phone and professional-level games on portables like Nintendo DS and PSP/Vita.

But only "portables like Nintendo DS and PSP/Vita" are suitable for genres that rely on physical buttons. As I understand it, virtually no one already owns an iCade controller, an iControlPad controller, or an Xperia Play phone.

that's an interesting question. i recently bought a transformer tablet with keyboard dock and a gameboy dsi xl. to be honest, there just aren't enough games for the 3ds to get me all that excited, also I really wanted to finally complete dragon quest ix and finally play the ff4 remake. I loaded up the tablet with as many games as I could, and while the graphics are astonishing, not many games are really all that compelling for more than a quick run. I've noticed the shift in mobile gaming to casual. I'm sur

Tell that to Steve Jobs. Anyway hardcore gamers agree with restrictions, less hacks and modders around means less cheaters in online games. What is happening is simply fragmentation and verticalization of the matured market, Vita has it's place as the high-end portable, and the sales are actually pretty good for the high price.

I think what is happening is not so simple as you make it out to be. The average gamer age continues to increase, and Vita certainly is more on the side of this demographic than the kid market. Sony is obviously concerned about Apple biting off this already slim piece on the portable market, but it might be a losing battle.

As people age, they tend to move towards the casual end of the spectrum. Less free time in their life, less games that appeal to them as an adult. And I think many adults start to see portable gaming devices as a 'kid thing'. A lot of this is women influencing men. Most adult women see men who do any gaming more than the occasional game with their friends as immature. So guys who want to get dates start leaving that hobby behind. So they naturally gravitate towards the casual games on smartphones. It's already a device they carry and it's more socially acceptable [to women].

So with this in mind, I think it will be hard for Sony to expand. One on side they have the unbeatable kid company, Nintendo. On the other, they have iPhones/Android devices taking away the hardcore-turned-casual adult gamers. So their main market seems to be the 13-22 segment. It's a profitable segment, but Sony is a bit stuck.

So, basically, what you're saying is: Blame the FemeNazis? I don't buy that. What I do buy is this:

I remember when Arcades hit the scene, man, that was great. Dedicated machines for playing one game -- From Skiball to Pinball, to Pong and Asteroids, Galaga, DigDug, etc.

Then came a general purpose game machine; It needed to be tailored to running only games. Then you could play multiple games via one device. General Purpose Computers were around, but they needed some dedicated tricks to do video game

FemeNazis? What? I'm talking about your typical adult woman who hasn't played a game since she was a kid. It's just sociology. Look at that recent study about females being the main driver of speech patterns in language. Males in general alter their behaviors in order to win the affection of females. And most of the women I've known haven't had a real high view of console/portable gaming. And well, the media hasn't really helped the

I can pretty much say everyone I know in that category plays a small fraction of the amount they used to.

Yepp. I recently (a few months ago) sold out the last big boxes of my quite impressive 20-year-old Pen & Paper RPG collection. I picked up Tango dancing 5 years ago, met a few ladies along the way and met my girlfriend a year ago at a small Tango event. Upping your skills in Tango beats playing and improving on Unreal Tournament 2004 CTF or WoW most of the time. So does it beat playing Torg or GURPS

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Apple sells fewer products than in the mid 90s, but it sells more product than in the mid 90s. In general, I'm like you, I like choices, which is why I'm not an Apple customer, but what you said is not at all a universal market truth.

Probably because it's not cost effective to fund games for a platform you're getting ready to cancel. I wasn't even aware the Vita still existed. When was the last time you saw a Vita ad that wasn't on a gaming website?

The Vita's only been in North America since February. (In Japan since one week before Christmas.) It has already sold ~2 million units. Of course that's tiny compared to the 18 miilion sold for 3DS, but it's par for how Sony v. Nintendo operates. In the previous generation:

So does the next phone and/or tablet I buy which will have more computing power, more memory, and provide greater access to the "potential" of the device. They should have just made an android-based phone with a really slick controller case. They could have even had an exclusive store like the amazon marketplace to sell their exclusive "Vita" games while still providing access to the Play store and all it's existing content.

And they put outdated hardware in it. What was nice about it was the slide out controller. Everything else was substandard. I couldn't help but feel the motivation was to not cannibalize anticipated sales of their upcoming Vita. As a result they have a variety of devices all trying not to compete with one another at the sacrifice of functionality and/or performance.

Unfortunately for him, it isn't even just the disruptive technology that he has to worry about... A Vita will run you ~$250, plus the essentially-obligatory proprietary memory card. PSPs are down around 120-130 new, less used or refurbed, and Nintendo handhelds are less than that. Even in its relation to the classic console market, the Vita targets only the (relatively narrow) niche of comparatively serious gamers who are on the go enough that having a portable as a primary or secondary console makes sense.

You guys are really being taken to the cleaners (not that that seems to be unusual, with electronics pricing). Is the Vita substantially less overpriced, or is the magnitude of the price delta between the two classes of handhelds still about the same as in the US?

In my whole time owning iPads & iPhones, I've never even thought about buying a controller for either. The only "controller" I've used is my iPhone as one for my iPad. I don't want to carry around another device just to make the one or two games I have that are designed for a controller slightly more playable.

We are in the touchscreen gaming generation for portables, even Sony admits this by adding a touchscreen to the Vita, but it's too little too late. As GP said, we all have smartphones/tablets that

We are in the touchscreen gaming generation for portables, even Sony admits this by adding a touchscreen to the Vita

Yet Nintendo kept the physical buttons on the DS, and Sony kept the physical buttons on the Vita, because the companies realize that physical buttons are just better for games in genres that don't involve pointing at on-screen objects. How would one control, say, a platformer on a pure touch device?

I don't know about that. This ouya thing has possibilities. It's way cheaper. I haven't bought a game system since the playstaion 2 because they're all too costly. The only thing lacking on smartphones are real handheld joystick controllers. Personally, I'm going to wait and see how this ouya thing shakes out. Until then, the old school game system emulators on this android phone work fine.

I bet you bought a WonderSwan Color when they were released in the US too. Nothing like being on the bleeding edge of consumer technology! There were two or three other "consoles" that Slashdot has featured over the years... none of them went anywhere. The cost of entry to that market, at least at the scales Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft operate at, is so high it's been impossible to break in to the market for almost ten years now. Now they have to compete against phones and tablets, too. I want the little guy t

So ouya bites the big one, huh? Ok, wtf do I know about modern gaming anyway. I guess all I really want is something powerful enough to handle playibg these ps/nintendo64 roms. And a real effing joystick. Guess I'll just have to build my own. Now, kindly remove yourselves from my carefully cultivated bluegrass.:)

MY PHONE and MY TABLET. do i need one more device on which to play android games?

You need an external Bluetooth controller for your Android device to allow your thumbs to feel where the action buttons are. I tried playing a game with an on-screen gamepad, and I kept missing the buttons.

almost all android games are written for the touchscreen. this will continue to be the case, because game devs aren't going to spend the resources to optimize for a platform with an extremely small portion of the market. if you don't believe this, look to the failure of the Sony (Ericsson) Play.

ouya will be lucky if they can get android devs to release games for their console, period... let alone optimize them for their hardware.

In these games, how does the player know whether his right thumb is over the jump button, the use primary tool button, or the use secondary tool button? I develop homebrew NES games as a hobby, and when I tried playing one of these using an emulator on my Nexus 7, I kept missing the buttons because unlike on a device with physical buttons, the player can't feel the edges of the on-screen buttons on a touch screen while looking at the action.

I've yet to see a single game for it that isn't a clone of something else

I've yet to see a game for any system in the past fifteen years that isn't a clone. There hasn't been a new genre launch (that I'm aware of) since Parappa the Rapper launched rhythm games. Even Katamari Damacy, which a lot of people have hauled out as an example of a highly original game, was just a 3D platformer with the growing mechanic from the early 1980s arcade game Bubbles. Of course I'm probably wrong; please correct me if so.

Phones and social media are eating away at portable gaming consoles, but it has nothing to do with the gaming aspect of either. Previously, you'd carry a handheld like the Gameboy so that you had *something* to do while sitting around waiting in line or for a bus or wasting time and grandmas or whatever. Today, most everyone has a phone, even teens or preteens. Yes, they can play games on them, but they can also simply browse the internet or post stuff on social media sites.

Gaming was never the draw for most people using portable devices; occupying time was the draw. People can do that with more stuff now, so of course the value of a strictly-gaming device is going to fall.

I can have no sympathy for people who are wasting grandmas. A grandma is not a thing to waste.

To be fair, the full quote was "or wasting time and grandmas or whatever." The OP knows there is a broad spectrum of things to waste so he gave two extreme examples and let us fill in the rest with whatever.

Curent portables have made huge advances in technology, but the form factor doesn't support these capabilities. When I am using a mobile device, I am not looking for a deeply immersive gaming experience. Even if I did want that, a 4 inch screen isn't going to cut it, regardless of the resolution. Just because hardware makers can port much of the graphic and input technologies into a mobile device, doesn't mean that they should.

For portable gaming, it is clear that people are satisfied with relatively si

I have a Vita, it's a nice piece of kit, lack of games is a bit of a concern, I've had mine for months yet only 3 games so far. It doesn't help that when on the tube (London Underground) you're lucky to be in a position where you have both hands free. I prefer reading on my kindle, least you're certain to have one hand free during rush hour!

Now portable wise it's the 1Ghz Pandora that I should be receiving next week. Generally it seems qemu is able to emulate roughly a 75Mhz Pentium on there. Just hope that Master of Orion 2 is playable on the move. Oh and I'm not trying to sell one to you (I'm not affiliated in anyway), you should really check it out;

actualyl I do not think the 3ds is doing well. Maybe it is doing better than PS Vita, but about a year after release there are not many good games on the platform. The original DS had so much more success. I really believe that smartphone are killing the handheld market.

Everybody is always predicting Nintendo's doom. They predicted it with the Gamecube (with merit since it finished in 2nd) (statistically-tied with Xbox), then the DS because they said nobody wants two screens, then the Wii because they claimed it was underpowered. The later two are now the #1 portable and TV console respectively. So much for people's prognostications.

On Slashdot, who cares about financials. As long as the company can keep operating, the profits generated are outside of our concern.

From a game player's standpoint, Nintendo is a step away from dead. They've increasingly come to rely on a small number of franchises that are growing increasingly stale. Exciting new games do not come out for Nintendo.

Bully for their bottom line that they've been good attracting people who don't normally buy games to buy a Wii and then put it into their closet 6 months lat

>>>Bully for their bottom line that they've been good attracting people who don't normally buy games to buy a Wii and then put it into their closet 6 months later.

Well Nintendo has sold as many Wiis as Sony sold PS1s, and the PS1 still holds the record for 2nd best-selling console. Ever. To try and say "Nintendo is a step away from dead" is pretty fucking ridiculous.

As for actual game sales, Sony only sold 17 million copies of GTA San Andreas whereas Nintendo sold almost double that amount. 32 m

If they had made a phone, OR BETTER YET, had made a phone add-on for the device (which they possibly still could), then it'd maybe sell.

The Vita does Skype already as did the PSP before it, and Sony did make a "gaming phone" the Xperia Play....turns out very few people want a gaming phone with slide out PSPgo style controls.

For a device to browse the web, they went with crappy NetFront again. Seriously, why? The device is more than capable of handling any other browser that isn't a piece of crap like that.

Access, the company that makes Netfront, is a Japanese company. SCEJ that does the PSfoo hardware, like Nintendo and Sega did before, prefers doing business with Japanese companies... The BBN web browser for the PS2 was also Netfront, as is the PSP and PS3 browsers. However the PS3 version is now a modern brow

What changed was the lockout chip, which was Atari's and Nintendo's response to a glut of Atari 2600 titles in 1983 that was threatening toy retailers' perceptions of video games in general. Only developers hand-picked by the console makers may make and publish games for the consoles, and the console makers' policies tend to require "relevant video game industry experience" on some other platform, which is ultimately more suited to poaching developers from other platforms than to launching careers. The mobi

But wait, wasn't the lackluster of sales and poor availability of games for the PSP the result of 'piracy' according to Jack? What's the excuse this time? The sales are merely 'acceptable'? And they're just having 'a hard time' getting developers to program for it? I think they're barking up the wrong tree here.

I can't buy a vita because looking at one makes me sad.Amazing hardware with great controls. Fast quad core CPU, OLED screen, everything you want... And fatally crippled by it's software. Sony so completely, amazingly out of touch with what the consumer wants that it can not make a functioning game ecosystem. They've taken their previous. "You'll take our shit and/like/ it" development model to the extreme and wonder why developers are giving it a pass.

Right. And we're talking about current generation systems. 2012. Today, not yesterday.The vita was dead before it launched and the 3ds is at best a substandard product based on 4 generations old technology. It's hardware is comparable with the original iphone and it's architecture resembles an overstuffed DS, not the modern dual or quad core SOC based systems that are now now common. It's 3D display is an expensive gimmick that's not panning out particularly well and doesn't add much real value.

What about Playstation Mobile which was previously called Playstation Suite? The SDK is currently free, and while you can't sell games though it yet you can develop games for the Vita, Sony Smartphones, and Tablets. They are also supposedly porting the Suite to other Android devices.

The SDK is based off of C#, and smartphone developers have said porting existing iOS and Android apps over is very easy.

How exactly did Sony fail to make a functioning game ecosystem? They have the traditional store bought ph

I was under the impression that the SDK was only free during the beta testing period where Sony could iron out the kinks, and would cost a yearly subscription to use afterwards similar to testing and deploying content on the 360 through Microsoft's XNA Framework.

The SDK is based off of C#, and smartphone developers have said porting existing iOS and Android apps over is very easy.

I thought C# would make porting Windows Phone apps and Xbox 360 XNA games easier. To translate an iOS or Android game would require a line-by-line rewrite of the game logic, which violates the "Don't Repeat Yourself" principle, introduces bugs, and doesn't allow changes to the C++ version to propagate to the C# version or vice versa.

Sony's having a hard time getting *gamers* interested in the Vita. It's an amazingly powerful handheld, but it's trying to offer $60, 40-hour console-level games in a portable.

It's competing not just with Nintendo's handheld, but with the iPhone and Android, and even to an extent Facebook games. Which are shorter and less involved, yes, but also cheaper, possibly even "free" (or at least, free-to-play, pay-to-win).

Problem is, portable gaming has shifted. It's not something you sit in front of for hours and play, it's something you play for a few minutes on your coffee break. Nintendo at least tries to make games that you *can* play for just a few minutes. They're not perfect at it (as evidenced by their own sales problems), but they're at least aware of the problem. Sony seems to be betting the house on people wanting full-sized games on a handheld, and that's just not really true anymore (to an extent, I doubt it ever really was). In the time it takes to *load* some Vita games, I can have finished a round of Angry Birds or Edge or whatever.

The other problem is that there's just no must-have games for it yet. For either handheld, really. They have a few good games apiece, but nothing that will sell not just the game, but the console. Third-parties rarely make those games - it's usually first-parties - but it doesn't help to not have them.

Problem is, portable gaming has shifted. It's not something you sit in front of for hours and play, it's something you play for a few minutes on your coffee break. Nintendo at least tries to make games that you *can* play for just a few minutes. They're not perfect at it (as evidenced by their own sales problems), but they're at least aware of the problem. Sony seems to be betting the house on people wanting full-sized games on a handheld, and that's just not really true anymore (to an extent, I doubt it ever really was). In the time it takes to *load* some Vita games, I can have finished a round of Angry Birds or Edge or whatever.

I think that the problem for hardware manufacturers is not that portable gaming has shifted, but that the optimal portable gaming experience has not significantly shifted. It works well as a casual, lightweight experience. Smartphones have rediscovered the sweet-spot that Sony (and, to a lesser extent Nintendo) drifted away from in their efforts to exploit technological leaps to drive hardware sales and satisfy demands for "innovation".

Sony, your users are not the enemy! I promise you that many other companies do just fine in life by embracing their users as customers instead of enemies. You can even make money off of them. Drop the hostile attitude and remember your roots. People aren't buying your products because they are perceived as bad for customers to own.

It's not about technology or usability. Why is this so hard to understand? How many billions of dollars do you have to lose before you/get/ this?

I'm pretty sure he's right that "Free to Play" is not the future of gaming. There's no indication so far that any game that costs nothing to play, but is monetized by the in-game purchases made by players will ever reach the kind of quality of experience of the best single-player games.

Maybe it's just my age. Maybe it's just that I actually remember really top-notch games that would engage you for 100 hours or more, where you came away thinking, "Man, if they make another one like this, I'll buy it day on

I'm pretty sure he's right that "Free to Play" is not the future of gaming. There's no indication so far that any game that costs nothing to play, but is monetized by the in-game purchases made by players will ever reach the kind of quality of experience of the best single-player games.

World of Tanks, while I haven't played it, is supposedly quite fun. There is also Dota 2 and League of Legends, both of which are quite high quality (Dota 2 looking better than any RTS I've ever seen before). LOTR Online went F2P and started making more money, as did Team Fortress 2.

F2P is not "the future", but it is "a" future. It is a perfectly valid and highly successful model, when done right. OTOH, of course, you have crap like FarmVille or Sim City Social, which are pure pay-to-win or aggravate-your-

I have a vita. I like it a lot. It's a very solid piece of hardware, lots of interesting features.

However, it'll have to be a decent bit cheaper and have a lot more interesting games to bring in too many outside of the core fan gamer crowd and jrpg fans. As is, it has few interesting games that aren't just portable versions of existing franchises. It has gravity rush, which is a great game, but it'll need something with a bit more exposure to pull people in.

The problem with the Vita is that it's just smartphone hardware, with console-priced games. And the 3DS, well, it's got the 3D gimmick, but a low screen resolution and a weak GPU (again, compared to recent smartphones+tablets)

In the past, handheld console haven't had anywhere near this level of competition from other mobile devices. If the Nexus 7 had gaming controls, it'd be a better gaming platform - and fairly open - for a similar price. But touchscreens are shite for many forms of gaming.

I will say, the vita is a lot more solidly built and responsive than most any smartphone I've touched, and it obviously has nice hard controls (the proper analog sticks in particular are the draw here). Even the touchscreen is much nicer than any smartphone I've seen.

But, you are probably right in the unfortunate reality that most will not care enough to buy a new device to gain these things, which is why, again, software must exist as a differentiator or there is no reason for most to want a vita.

. . . but I can still buy full-featured mobile games for 1/10th - 1/60th the price of what Tretton is selling. Tretton has more in common with the nickle-and-dimers than he may want to acknowledge. The difference is, he wants gamers to pay through the nose up front, rather than stringing them along (and giving them the option to wise up before spending too much).

I agree with his comments on social gaming and, for the most part, don't think he goes far enough. I don't believe games like Farmville and Infinity Blade are going to replace anything in gaming proper. That said, as an avid gamer I have less than zero interest in the Vita - no one's doing portable gaming well these days, the last good portable system I enjoyed was the original Gameboy and a copy of Tetris. Maybe in a few years, with a different manufacturer.

Cause its expensive and shares the same heritage as the PSP, which means we will get 4 hardware revisions and a pile of expensive shovelware shit games. I dont know about others, but I sure as shit am not wasting my time or money on a sony portable ever again.

The Gnome 3 developers are against ripoff 'freemium' games that gouge you with microtransactions or plodding game pace if you don't buy their virtual junk with money? And 'social' games whose whole existence is for spamming people with annoying 'My cow farted in Farmville' messages? Maybe they're smarter than I thought..